Texas-born actor Caleb Landry Jones, 28, has been called Hollywood’s “go-to oddball”. After making his screen debut in 2007 in the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, he appeared in the TV series Friday Night Lights, played Banshee in X-Men: First Class and was the lead in Antiviral, by Brandon (son of David) Cronenberg, playing a man who traffics in “celebrity viruses”. In 2017, he appeared in the hit horror comedy Get Out as well as The Florida Project and Twin Peaks: The Return. Now he stars alongside Frances McDormand in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as Red, a small-town advertising man caught up in a woman’s quest for justice.

You’re calling from LA right now, but you’re originally from Garland, Texas, is that right?
No, from Richardson, Texas, but born in the Garland hospital. My mom’s always going [puts on a “shrieky mom” voice]: “Why do they say Garland, Caleb?” – “I don’t know, Mom, I think I must have said it once.”

Missouri’s not exactly next door to Texas, but did you feel that the world of Three Billboards… was close enough to your background that you felt on familiar terrain?
Not really. Richardson is more a suburb, it’s a very different feeling to Martin McDonagh’s world. The film is very much of right now, about stuff that’s going on, things that are being discussed. The messages in the film are all a reality, the characters are very real and the story’s very real – and at the same time, it is definitely a McDonagh world, you know what I mean? To me, it feels like a place that does exist and doesn’t exist at the same time.

The film is a very powerful statement about men, women and sexual violence – it seems absolutely a film of 2017.
He wrote it eight years ago or something like that! But it’s about stuff that’s been a problem ever since I was brought into this world, you know? We really need to change the consciousness.

You’re working with actors in the film – Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell - who give some extremely full-on performances. Was there anyone who terrified you?
Mildred Hayes [McDormand’s character] terrified me. It felt like it worked in real time, Frances playing Mildred… I wasn’t sure what to think – did she hate me, did she like me? “I’m intimidated, oh gosh she does hate me, da da da da da”, all these insecurities. It probably helped me, you know. Doing those scenes and being nervous, all those feelings that came naturally were feelings that worked so well for the character of Red.

You’ve actually worked with both McDonagh brothers: in 2016 you were in John Michael McDonagh’s War on Everyone.
They’re very different from each other. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen them in the same room. One’s better at pool than the other.

Get Out has come high in a lot of best of 2017 lists. Did you realise how important the film would be? Did you know it would be a movie that would start arguments about race?
Yeah, if enough people saw it, that would definitely happen. When I read it, I knew absolutely that whoever saw the movie, then they would absolutely love it, if we could do it like it was in the script. Because the script was so different from anything else you’re going to see… I was very nervous about the violence and about the end, the bloodbath, but it really left a lot to the imagination.

According to its director, Jordan Peele, your performance style can be scary. In one interview you said: “You know when you push so hard and you pop blood vessels and go unconscious a little bit? Sometimes it’s like that, when you wake up and you don’t know where you are.” Is that really what happens?
That was X-Men and Antiviral. Yes, sometimes, I don’t know, you try to be there and be completely present, whatever the hell that means, you’re trying to kind of exist there and fill in all the colours and say what you’re supposed to say and get these emotions across. But sometimes you get into it and all of a sudden, “Cut!” … and maybe something happened where for the first time it didn’t feel like bullshit and it just really all came out of you, and “Oh thank God, I did say the lines – and why has that chair fallen over?” “You knocked it over, Caleb.” Sometimes you go into a little bit of a blank space , which is probably not good. You should probably always be aware of what you’re doing.

You specialise in playing either really unpleasant people, or people who are extremely fragile like your characters in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium and Antiviral.
Ha ha ha! Well, Byzantium and Antiviral, I did those back to back, [playing] two guys who look like they’re going to drop dead pretty soon.

One of your forthcoming films, Viena and the Fantomes with Dakota Fanning, is about a 1980s punk band, and you also make music yourself. You were in a band called Robert Jones playing what’s been described as “experimental folk rock”.
We did a lot of folk music because we didn’t have anything to plug in and no one wanted to hear us plugged in. My dad bought me a drum set and my friend Robert got a guitar and we got into making music, then he went to college – but that got me to start writing my own. It’s been one of the greatest things in my life, learning I can do that, it’s as good as getting to act and doing films. I got into Pink Floyd, and that’s just rolled into a bigger and bigger obsession. Good old Syd Barrett – he’s the guy.

You’ve done a lot in 2017, and you have five more films due for release. Do you have a workaholic streak?
A Hollywood streak? Oh, a workaholic streak… I am quite obsessive. I do like to work a lot. I’m also very good at doing nothing.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is released on 12 January